This morning voters in much of Maryland awoke with plans to go to the polls early and then head off to a normal day. Unfortunately when they got to their polling places they only found locked doors.

As reported by the Baltimore Sun many poll workers did not show up for work this morning and when they did they many had no idea how to operate new voting technology called "e-poll books" which are a necessary part of the voting process in Maryland and many other Diebold states. The workers were not trained to use that technology because Diebold did not provide the technology to the state until it was too late to properly train the pollworkers.

According to the Sun...

Tardy election judges in Baltimore caused delays at dozens of polling places this morning, prompting some candidates to call for extended hours at affected polls in the city and Baltimore, Anne Arundel and Montgomery counties.
...
Armstead B.C. Jones Sr., president of the Baltimore Board of Elections, said that in addition to late arrivals, poll workers are unfamiliar with several pieces of new voting equipment debuting today, which is causing additional delays.

"Poll workers go through a class that's three hours long, but some of the technology wasn't available to us in time for everyone to be trained on it," Jones said, referring to the new electronic check-in system, called e-poll books. "This is not unusual for an election morning when you're dealing with brand new equipment."

Not unusual? What an unbelievable statement to make when talking about elections. It's his job as the president of the Board of Elections to ensure that every poll worker is trained and that no equipment is new to them. What should be unusual is that Mr. Jones keep his job.

And this is not the whole story. Added to a lack of trained poll workers to open the polls and operate the equipment we also learn that when the supplies were sent out to the polls in Montgomery County someone forgot to include the smart cards. These are the cards that have the ballot definition and the machines will not work without them.

The Sun says:

In Montgomery County, electronic voting at most polling locations did not start until after 8 a.m. because local election organizers forgot to include a critical start-up card for the machines in precinct supply kits, said Margaret A. Jurgensen, the county's election director.

The Washington Post is reporting that voters in Montgomery County are being given provisional ballots by poll workers until the smart cards are received. Unfortunately many polling sites ran out of provisional ballots which kept voters from voting until workers could scramble to get copies made. Even more unfortunate is the fact that these provisional ballots require inspection before they can be counted. The county should have required 'emergency ballots' to be used. These ballots would just be handled as if they were received in the mail as absentee ballots.

As this is being written candidates and political parties are beginning to ask that the polls be kept open longer this evening to make up for the late start this morning. We are also getting reports that local radio and TV station switchboards are being filled with complaints from voters who have had problems this morning. The Baltimore Sun has three people taking handling a constant flood of calls from voters with complaints.

Added to all of this is information that Diebold and the state are using technicians ("rovers") who were just hired from a technical services company, PDS Technical Services, that advertised for help on Monster.com and the only technical qualification for these people who were to provide technical oversight is that they have "some high school course work".

This post will be updated throughout the day as more information comes out.

UPDATE More information from the "Train Wreck":
Poll workers arrived at work this morning to face new "E Poll Books" which they had never seen before and on which they had gotten only a minimum of training. This technology ties in with the state's new voter registration data base. Due to these two issues some voters are arriving for the first time at the polls only to be told that they had 'already voted'.

Also being reported are "Candidate selections missing from review screens, machine crashes requiring multiple re-boots, lots of precincts running out of the paper ballot back-ups, and battery problems.

UPDATED LATE THIS AFTERNOONFox Newsreports that a judge has found that polls can stay open for an extra hour this evening. This will now keep the polls open until 9PM tonight. However, the county says that only paper ballots can be used during that time.

This leads to a concern about the handling of the paper ballots that many, many voters have been forced to use. Historically provisional ballots have not always been counted and handling of those ballots takes a bit more work in that each voter who cast a provisional ballot must be checked to ensure they are truly eligible to vote. Now officials are concerned that these thousands of ballots cast today due to failures in the election administration process and with technology will be handled differently than normal ballots and may not be counted at all.

According to Fox:

Mike Morrill, a spokesman for attorney general candidate Douglas Gansler, said the results could be skewed if provisional votes aren't counted until later, given the possibility that a large number of people were forced by the glitches to use the ballots.

"To treat them as if they were provisional, as if they may or may not count, continues the disenfranchisement of Montgomery County voters," he said.

Morrill said Gansler's legal advisers were reviewing the decision.

It will be a surprise if there are not more than one lawsuits after this debacle is done.

Also an issue is that when polling places ran out of ballots they made copies of the ballots. However, because the ballot was bigger than a normal sheet of copy paper the printed ballots were pages long. Are these new ballots legal and will they be counted? Only time will tell.

Sounds even worse than Cuyahoga county- untrained/missing pollworkers, missing memory cards, insufficient equipment arriving just before election...
I pity you folks in MD. Taking away somebody's ability to vote, either intentionally or incompetently, should be treason.

In its first opportunity to properly preside over an election, the Squ-Ehrlich administration screws it up like a shady land deal gone bad. What an overt attempt to depress voter turnout during a time when Republicans are vulnerable and running from Bobby's buddy George W. Bush. When he gets bounced from the Governor's mansion, he can kiss those free vacations at Camp David goodbye!

TJ says: ..."DOZENS (of polling places). About par for ANY election in ANY state. Jeesh."

Yeah, it probably is about par for any election in any state in an era of virtually unregulated electronic voting machines. What's the big deal about a few thousand votes lost here and there, TJ, as long as it's not your vote and as long as the RIGHT guys keep on winning.

"This is Florida 2000! We need to ditch these electronic voting machines and go back to the old fashioned Votamatics with the mechanical levers. They provided a paper trail and everyone knew how to use them. We don't need a better mousetrap just because the elections in Florida were corrupt."

I sent this bradblog info to a friend who lives in MD this morning and he confirmed that there was a problem at his precinct. He got there at 7:00 and no one knew how to start up the machine. He was offered a provisional paper ballot and that is what he voted on.

I'll make you a bet this is affecting more than "dozens" of precincts.

Spoke to MD Board of Elections communications director, Mary Heath. To her credit, she was professional and patient in her explanations about what has gone wrong so far in MD. She attributed much of the problems in many polling stations, and especially across Montgomery County, to human error. She said it has been incredibly hard for them to recruit able pollworkers and election judges who can pass background checks, absorb a huge amount of training materials, and then put in a 7am-11pm volunteer work day on election day.

Remedies: 1) make election judge/pollworker service mandatory, like jury duty? Or, Democrats use this huge opportunity to staff the polls to absolutely ensure voting goes off without a hitch. 2) get ourselves on a paper-based, fully transparent and auditable voting process ASAP. Not only is training for paper ballots straightforward and simple, but also the paper trail exists immediately following the vote.

When I asked about the Diebold machines, Mary claimed Maryland learned from Florida 2000/2004, Ohio 2004, and California 2006, to make their machines more secure, etc. Of course, when I asked why it was these machines could not be designed to provide paper receipts which could later be scanned into optical scanners for verification, she said the machines are equipped with printers, but that reprints of a single ballot are over 7 feet long ?!? This from a company that makes ATM machines perfectly capable of printing out receipts after every transaction.

I'm more resolved than ever to push MD legislators, hard, to resolve this issue.

The judges at our Montgomery County, MD, polling site didn't know what to do about the lack of voter access cards, so they started sending prospective voters to another polling location. They even put up signs directing folks to the other polls.

A number of people gave up and left in disgust. I wonder how many potential votes weren't cast because of the delay in bringing voter access cards to the polls.

Even if it were 10 potential votes, multiply that by 238 precincts in Montgomery County, and you've got 2380 votes --- enough to change the results of many local races.

This s a Democrat county, in a Blue state, and these Diebold machines were purchased by the Democratic state elections commissioner. Which is why our Democratic leadership will not lift a finger to get rid of these Cheating Machines.

No one is looking to find competent poll workers. And, that's what they are counting on to keep the status quo. If intelligent honest patriotic people (democrats) who are not satisfied with the way elections are being conducted, they should get off their lazy bitching asses and become poll workers or just shut the hell up! What is it with you people...flapping your gums and sitting in front of a computer typing all day and no one even makes the minutest effort to help or get involved or help one person register to vote. The most important election in years is about to take place all anyone can do is bitch and blog.

Guess the neocon and repugs don't have to send their "1st team" trolls to bradblog, so we just get the morons. So tell me, steve, you would have to admit that "dozens" is more than enough to skew the results if they are ALWAYS in areas that vote DEMOCRATIC, right?

So bradblog isn't about the truth either - you are a relatively small-time player and the faux "advertise liberally" group refuses to cover these issues or link to your blog.

americablog, atrios, fdl, digby, c&l, kos, greenwald, and the rest of that gang REFUSES to acknowledge these issues AND YOU DELETE AND BAN ANYONE THAT POINTS THIS OUT!

Then you have the gumption to post IMPORTANT BREAKING stories that get buried in silence by the MSM and the self-proclaimed "liberal" blogs (NOT!)

Yet you constantly ask for money, despite the fact that you are also CENSORING comments that point out the hypocracy of the concerted effort by "so-called-liberal" blogs to bury the issues you discuss. You are part of the problem if you are not part of the solution - grandstanding over this but remaining silent (and actively censoring) dialog about these important issues is just as bad as the lying liars in MSM.

Er, so what's up with the "background check" statement by the MD Board of Elections communications director, Mary Heath that EagleFury was good enough to find out for us. Now I'm not saying it's a bad idea on the surface - for public safety that is - but I don't know - it just seems odd. Does it deter some volunteers? What kind of things do they check?

P.S. Montgomery County blaming "volunteers" is not a new concept. Nonetheless, the persons training them are paid yes?

“Objection 4. Hackers can do anything: [Answer:]. Only in books and movies. The hacking stories we read in the papers concern attacks over the Internet against systems that are deliberately held open for access by the general public. Voting machines, by contrast, are highly controlled and cannot be accessed over the Internet. Hackers are not omniscient and even vendors have trouble programming tabulation software correctly. The prospect that a hacker could not only manipulate an election but do it without exhibiting a detectable bug is so far-fetched an idea that no one has come close to showing how it might be done.”

And here is an interesting Maryland snippet on the integrity of DRE’s. Check out Myth 4 Fact 3…

Brad censors comments about kos/americablog/etc??? I always say they stink. So does Huffington Post and now Air America radio. Those places never talk about e-vote fraud, that's why I don't go to them. And I question their motives, on why they suppress this subject. Anyone know why? And my former hero Al Franken, too.

All I can say is what a catastrophe. Much to my disappointment, the democrats AND republicans IN Maryland (save about two, which were my senator (dem) and delegate (rep)) are rotten.

It was Paula Hollinger's democratic senate committee that haulted any sort of paper trail or way to count the votes. Hollinger who launders money, I heard. Thank god she lost the congressional race!

I was at a presinct in the evening. ONE of the voting machines was down all day. I was astonished at the results OR the people of Maryland are mindless automations who choose proven crooks to be elected because they put out a lot more crap advertising with lies.

Are people really so stupid? Or is it the voting machines??? They voted for people who chose to deregulate our gas and electric so that now we are going to be paying 200 percent more. But that is OK with their constituents.

At the end of the evening they taped cash register rolls on a window that contained the votes for each machine.

OR there is something seriously wrong with the voting machines and NO way to count the votes . .no paper, nothing. We have to accept their results on blind faith.

All day long my in box filled with reports from all over the state. People turned away, not able to even vote, power outages, broken machines that would not power on. Cards not delivered. Poll books that when voters got there, it said they had already voted . . . and they had to fill out provisionals, but HOW are they going to check if that person voted? With no paper or way to trace it??

OMG I am really mad . . . AND disenfranchised. HOW do we KNOW if our votes even count????

Meanwhile, on the other coast, out in Diebold's one-time "showcase state" of Maryland where the Republican Governor recently declared he "no longer [has] confidence in the State Board of Elections' ability to conduct fair and accurate elections in 2006" on Diebold's machinery, Mike Himowitz in the Baltimore Sun rages against the machines and the pitfalls of secret software used to count our votes:

With every jurisdiction in Maryland now using the same system, all it takes to ruin an entire statewide election is a single glitch in a single line of that secret code.

In the systems business, this is known as a computer monoculture. It's a term borrowed from agriculture to describe a large area planted in a single crop - and hence vulnerable to devastating damage from a single source. Maryland is completely planted with Diebold's electronic cotton - all it needs for disaster is one electronic boll weevil.

To all of this criticism, Linda H. Lamone, the state election administrator has had one response: "Trust us."

Well, I don't and you shouldn't. Elections aren't based on trust. They're based on verifiable results. You can't throw technology at a problem and throw common sense out the window. There's no way to fix this system. I don't care how much we've spent on it.

#18 Let's try to stick together. Who 'ya gonna' turn to? I've never had any kind of problem railing against the liberal blogs on bradblog. Just did it on another thread. Kos was my pet peeve. Americablog..Crooks and liars is allowing 9/11 news now just because so many people are seeing the light. It'll happen with the election machines. Just don't forget we lost Jack, Martin and Bobby before election fraud. It's all the same folks.big oil...big corporations. We walk a thin line of fascism

So, why did election judges have people vote on the back of pamphlets, scraps of paper, redirect them to other polling places? Like any of those votes will be counted. Who was in charge of the communication for PLAN B. Where is the PLAN B for when there is system failure?

Dixie - I will bitch while sitting on my ass blogging if and when I damn well feel like it.

I feel compelled to respond to Dixicrat's rant.
For several years I was a Democratic election judge in Montgomery County Maryland. I stopped participating after a few elections with electronic voting. Once the state of Maryland (after an initial study by Johns Hopkins University determined the vulnerability of the system)refused to allow paper receipts, that was it for me. I felt unable in good conscience, to certify any election's validity anymore and just maybe other intelligent people like me sat back down on their lazy bitching asses in dismay and despair.

No axe to grind - just asking why it is not possible to discuss the FACT that the rest of the "advertise liberally" blogs WILL NOT COVER YOUR STORIES OR LINK TO YOUR SITE?

Who's the FRAUD - YOU OR THEM! Legitimate question and the facts are on my side.

It is starting to appear the disinformation is actually on your side

{Ed Note: No. It only "looks" like that because yours has been deleted, and anyone as obsessed as you are about this stuff should take the hint, sit back and consider more carefully, rather than just scheme their way boldly forward. --99}

Taffy, giving-up isn't the answer or what made America great. The first Revolution took 8 years to win and another 15 just to get our country going. Americans don't stop until they close the lid on their coffins. Rest when you're dead cuz deomocracy can be taken away at any time - it is not a permanent system; it is a concept, just like freedom.

This news about the electoral mess caused by the poorly managed introduction of the new Diebold electronic voting machines is only the tip of the iceberg. Much more disturbing to me, as a Maryland resident and an American, is the recent confirmation by a team of Princeton researchers that the Diebold machines are definitely not secure and are easily hackable. All election results determined in part or in whole by these machines should be disallowed and, if necessary, elections rescheduled using a more secure method of vote tallying.

So I get it....Feeney from Florida (2000 election?) and Ney from Ohio (2004 election). Corruption is as corruption does, as they say. Let's dig further into their connections to these two stolen elections maybe?